Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

I swore that once the mini-heat wave broke, Co-pilot Egg's graduation party was over and done, and I got caught up on the not insignificant job of moving into my new computer*, I'd get back to working on the RV-12. And I would have, had it not been for such perfect weather for a little bit of RV-6 flying. Light winds out of the east and air that was so clear that it almost sparkled? Yeah, gotta fly in that!

I snagged a quick camera shot of my neighborhood as I was left base for runway 4 at KTZR:

While it has been dry enough that the grass is showing a few brown spots in the thin soil areas over the propane tank and some of the drainage lines, the overall mood in Central Ohio is "Green."

I haven't completely ignored the Call of the Builder, though. Pete and I got out to the hangar a couple of nights ago to continue on our respective tasks. For Pete, that means work on the tail cone. The tail cone was intended to be completed a long, long time ago; a time when there was no big horizontal stabilator in the way. Which means, of course, that we had to get that big Slab O' Flight Control out of the way, a job the we had hoped to avoid.  It's typical of this whole project, though: what has been installed will soon be removed.  Two steps forward, one (or more, occasionally) step back.

Naturally, remove the stab would require the disconnection of the control cables. One thing we really don't want to have to do is try to fish those cables out of the fuselage if they somehow manage to fall back inside there, so we restrained them with some twine.

Pete has endured hours of the traditional parts on - parts off - parts sanded - parts on - parts off - parts sanded mating dance that is required to convince two fiberglass parts that were actually made for each other to fit as nicely together as if they were, well... made for each other. I think the fit is great, but Pete is apparently not quite ready to publicly celebrate the fruits of his labor; note the way he skulks around hiding when the camera comes out:

My job was far more mundane, but somewhat complicated by another case of doing a long deferred job that would have been much easier to do before a large chunk of metal was inconveniently installed. In this case, I'm talking about the engine, and there is no way that we're removing that! I was supposed to match drill through this part and into the cowl, but given its location on the belly of the plane, there was no way to get a drill on it with the engine in the way. I had to try to mark the location with a Sharpie, then remove the cowl to drill it on the bench.  Two forward, one back.

 Once drilled, it requires the installation of some nutplates. That part was easy.

As long as the cowl bottom was off, I also knocked out another job that I've been putting off, this one having been deferred due to my strong distaste for the job of cutting fiberglass to the scribe line. It's noisy, dusty, and smelly. And there is always the risk of damaging a very expensive part. The scribe lines are weak and the Dremel is strong. A recipe for disaster, that!

This should be the last big cut on the cowls - it is the removal of a little bit of fiberglass around the inlet for the oil cooler:

* Processor: Intel Core i7-3770K 3.5 GHz, 64 bit Quad-Core Processor, 8MB L3 Cache per Processor 
  Memory: 8GB DDR3 1600 Memory 
  Storage: 2TB SATA-III 6.0Gb/s 7200RPM Hard Drive 
  Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 7850 2GB Graphics 
  Unbelievably Geeky Cooling: 240mm Liquid Cooling System. Seriously, this thing actually has a radiator and cooling hoses leading to the main CPU chip.